Cloud

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Cloud

Crossconnect has a mature DevOps practice providing expert-level design and services for Azure networking, scalability with containerization and Kubernetes, and Infrastructure-as-Code with Terraform.

Crossconnect has a mature DevOps practice providing expert-level design and services for Azure networking, scalability with containerization and Kubernetes, and Infrastructure-as-Code with Terraform.

In the words of one of our customers, XIFIN:

“…our company has decided to move towards Microsoft Azure and a cloud services focus. Crossconnect has been of the utmost help in this change. Crossconnect has performed the network design and network security design for all of our Azure environments. This design had a particular focus on replicating our on-premise security controls into our new cloud environments, to include VPNs, firewalling, visibility, and control.

 The Azure migration also had a particular focus on infrastructure-as-Code, primarily using Terraform. Crossconnect assisted us in deploying our network design and our security controls via Terraform, as well as peer-reviewing our Terraform code.”

AVP of Information Technology

Architect Azure correctly from the ground up

Many Azure networks grow organically or were designed without the network in mind. Network concepts shouldn’t be disregarded when moving from on-premises networks to cloud, those same concepts carry through, they just move to software. It’s easy to disregard the network design step and have architectural and scalability problems down the line.

Having an expert-level design of your Azure network is just as vital as it was on-premises. Crossconnect’s experience makes us the perfect partner to assist in designing your cloud datacenter to be secure, scalable, redundant, compliant, and to interoperate with your on-premises datacenter.

Crossconnect can architect and design:

  • Hub/Spoke environment topologies, incl. designing limited communication & shared spokes.
  • Virtual Networks, VNet peerings, and User Defined Route creation and maintenance
  • Azure Firewall deployment, rule creation, maintenance, and rule audit and certification
  • Design & deployments of both native Azure appliances such as Azure Firewall and Application Gateways or third-party firewalls such as Palo Alto VM firewalls and Cisco vFTD firewalls.
  • Azure Application Gateway and Load Balancer deployments, rule creation and maintenance
  • Global Load Balancing and BC/DR design with Azure FrontDoor and Traffic Manager
  • Deploying Azure Site Recovery to include pre-deployment of load balancing, firewalling, and routing for the cold site, as well as running DR tests.
  • Design connectivity between Azure environment and on-premises environment via VPNs (redundant, BGP, static) or Azure Express Route.

Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC)

It’s also best practice to build Azure networks programmatically. This is known as Infrastructure-as-Code, and is done by scripting the network build instead of manually configuring it via the Azure web interface.

IaC brings these benefits:

  • Easier scalability – code is re-usable, and complex environments – firewalls, load balancers, VNets – can be duplicated programmatically.
  • Elimination of human error – most tasks in IoC are intended to be re-usable, and once the code works initially, with proper maintenance, it continues to work error-free.
  • Change management – when appropriately developed, the system documents your changes, allowing for an easy way to detect unapproved changes in the environment or to recover to a previously working state.

Crossconnect has a mature DevOps practice focused on dynamically building and scaling your cloud environments, in a secure fashion, using IaC. Development is performed in the programming language of the customer’s choice – some typical ones are Terraform’s HCL, Python, Javascript, or C#.

  • Automate your entire network deployment via IaC.
  • Azure IaC experience includes Terraform/HCL based deployments from multiple DevOps orchestration solutions such as Github and Azure DevOps. We can also support ARM and Powershell based solutions in Azure.
  • Automate VM and/or container creation for workloads as well as scaling up and down as needed.
  • Experienced at working with development teams in designing their repositories and orchestration solutions to deploy code to application servers through git-based solutions. (e.g. GitHub Action Plans)
  • Kubernetes orchestration and the process of containerizing your applications to improve scaling, resource usage, and redundancy.
  • Use Ansible to orchestrate at the OS level, automating the installation and maintenance of all of your server applications to reduce the time of manual installation and maintenance